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Measuring the Next Global Development Goals

Measurement is crucial for creating a development agenda that will do the most good for the most people, given limited resources. But how much money can the international community justify diverting from development initiatives to improving data collection and analysis?

COPENHAGEN – At the start of the twenty-first century, the international community made some smart and simple promises with the so-called Millennium Development Goals. The world would halve the proportion of people suffering from hunger and living in extreme poverty, achieve universal primary education, and dramatically reduce child mortality by 2015. There have been many successes, though not all of the MDGs’ targets will be achieved.

The target of halving hunger, for example, may be missed – though not by much. In 1991, 23.4% of all people in the developing world were malnourished; more than a billion people went to bed hungry. By 2013, the proportion had dropped to 13.5%. Though the developing world had 1.7 billion more people than in 1991, 209 million fewer were starving. Over the past 22 years, the world has managed to feed almost two billion more people adequately – no small feat.

Over the next year, the world’s 193 governments will come together to set new global targets to be met by 2030. The task amounts to this generation’s greatest opportunity to translate high aspirations into concrete targets. But choosing the targets that will do the most good requires learning from current experience.

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Mr. Lomborg again appears on the surface to be well-intentioned and informative, but as usual, readers who click through his links will see that he has a hidden agenda. That agenda is contrary to the world-wide consensus that use of fossil fuels must be reduced urgently.

The UN Millennium Development Goals are very clear, putting sustainable energy and climate change concerns at the top of their priorities. But Lomborg's solicited panelists reached their own "consensus" that global warming measures should have the lowest priority.

Lomborg's organization was at one time funded by the Danish government, but that funding was publicly ended in 2012. The organization has not revealed its sources since then. Lomborg has not answered claims that he is funded by fossil fuel interests.

His column this month employs the misleading rhetorical tactic of assuming that some otherwise irrelevant variable is fixed, and then analyzing policy options as if they were constrained by the unnecessary assumption. In fact it is well known that development aid programs fail for a variety of reasons, including corrupt local officials. We are all in favor of transparency and accountability.

But Mr. Lomborg is only exploiting that consensus, to hide his own controversial agenda - to keep the discussion of development away from the crucial issues of sustainability and reduction of fossil fuel dependency.

First Global Warming, then Climate Change - the problem is pollution.
No more cars in the street - PLUBLIC TRANSPORT, no more pleasure & sports yachts, no more intensive fisheriy - FISH FARMING, no more SPORTS FISHING & HUNTING, no more burning of grasslands & forest: no more wastewater to river, lakes, sea - treatment and reuse; garbage clasification, reuse, energy & chemical production etc. Intensive use of transgenic and MO, recovery of degradated land, intensive agriculture, education & trainging of the rural people etc. etc. It is not difficult nore expensive to make a better world - we must only begin